Automatic flashlight tag damage sensor

You’re out at night and playing a boisterous game of flashlight tag. But how can you tell if you’ve been mortally wounded by your opponents light beam? [Kenyer] solved this problem by building a flashlight tag damage sensor which is worn by each participant. It adds a bit of the high-tech equipment used with laser tag while keeping a low-tech price tag.

The sensor relies on a light dependent resistor to register hits when a flashlight beam passes through the round window. It will only register one hit in a three-second time period. At the end of the game, the total number of hits recorded can be flashed back using an on-board LED to see who is the victor. You can see a demo of this functionality in the clip after the break.

Nice to see a microprocessor development board, be being used as such. No doubt their are many who do so, but the “hacker press” seems not to be finding them, to report on. That my notion that that their are many who do is wishful thinking on my part.

I think it should actually measure the total amount of light that hits the sensor in an analog (A2D) sort of way, rather than discrete “hits”. Perhaps the player would be out once his “light meter” was full or something.